Phusion Blog

Phusion Passenger is an Apache and Nginx module for deploying Ruby on Rails web applications, and is mainly focused on ease of use and stability.

Recent changes

Phusion Passenger is under constant maintenance and development. We are pleased to announce Phusion Passenger version 2.2.8. This is a bug fix release.

[Nginx] Fixed some signal handling problems.

Restarting Nginx on OS X with SIGHUP can sometimes take a long time or even fail completely. This is because of some signal handling problems, which have now been fixed.

[Nginx] Added OpenSSL as dependency.

OpenSSL is required in order to install Nginx, but this was not checked by passenger-install-nginx-module. As a result, passenger-install-nginx-module fails on e.g. out-of-the-box Ubuntu installations until the user manually installs OpenSSL. Issue #422.

[Nginx] Fixed support for internal redirects and subrequests.

It is now possible to, for example, point X-Accel-Redirects to Phusion Passenger-served URLs. Patch contributed by W. Andrew Loe III: issue #433.

[Apache] Fixed a GnuTLS compatibility issue

mod_gnutls can cause Phusion Passenger to crash because of an unchecked NULL pointer. This problem has now been fixed: issue #391.

Fixed thread creation issue on Intel Itanium platforms.

This fixes issue #427.

Fixed compilation problems on Linux running on the Renesas SH4 CPU.

Patch contributed by iwamatsu: issue #428.

The Rack library has been unvendored.

The original reason for vendoring was to work around broken Rails applications that explicitly specify Rack as a gem dependency. We’ve found a better workaround that does not require vendoring Rack. This also fixes a compatibility problem with Rails 3, because Rails 3 depends on a newer Rack version than the one we had vendored. Issue #432.

Fixed compatibility with Ruby 1.9.1 patchlevel >= 152

Ruby 1.9.1 patchlevel >= 152 has a bug in its tempfile library. If you’ve seen an error message along the lines of

*** Exception IOError in Passenger RequestHandler (closed stream)

then this is a Ruby bug at work. This bug has been fixed in Ruby 1.9.2, but Ruby 1.9.1 still contains this bug. We’ve added a workaround so that the bug is not triggered with this Ruby version. Issue #432.

How do I upgrade to 2.2.8?

Via a gem

Please install it with the following command:

gem install passenger

Next, run:

passenger-install-apache2-module

Or, if you’re an Nginx user:

passenger-install-nginx-module

Please don’t forget to copy & paste the Apache/Nginx config snippet that the installer gives you.

Via a native Linux package

John Leach from Brightbox has kindly provided an Ubuntu 8.04 package for Phusion Passenger. The package is available from the Brightbox repository which you can find at:

http://apt.brightbox.net

Add the following line to the Third Party Software Sources:

deb http://apt.brightbox.net hardy main

(The simplest way to do that is to create a file in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ containing the deb instruction, and then run ‘apt-get update’).

Once you’ve done this then you can install Phusion Passenger by running:

sudo apt-get install libapache2-mod-passenger

-or-

sudo apt-get install nginx-brightbox

(Note that John is currently packaging 2.2.8, so it might take a while before this release shows up in the apt repository.)

Final

Phusion Passenger is provided to the community for free. If you like Phusion Passenger, please consider sending us a donation. Thank you!